In honor of the famed chef's 100th birthday, we look back at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, originally featured in our July/August 1976 issue

It spoke to us the moment we walked in the door. What is now our great gray clapboard Cantabrigian home felt right to us—warm and welcoming—just as our little Georgetown house had felt the moment we walked in when we lived in Washington between Paul’s diplomatic posts. We’d been living abroad off and on since World War II, and we said to ourselves in 1958 that Norway, our next post, would be our last one. We wanted our permanent residence to be in Cambridge, Massachusetts. If we wanted a house here, said our Cambridge mentor, Avis DeVoto, we’d better start looking around immediately, as good ones were snapped up before they ever hit the open market. She would keep her ears open, she said, and a few weeks before we were to leave for Oslo she called us in Washington: “Come immediately.”

We arrived in Cambridge promptly at 8:30 a.m., as bidden, and already two other couples were exploring the house. After a good first impression at the front door, we inspected the large cellar, the attic and its adjoining separate apartment, and noted a big room on the second floor that could serve as Paul’s studio. On the ground floor we rejoiced in a large airy kitchen with not only one, but two, pantries, a fine dining room, and there were even two living rooms. Our visit took less than twenty minutes, and with no more ado we signed the dotted line.

Two and a half years later, in the summer of 1961, we returned and took up occupancy. As seems usual with us, we lived in the house during the renovations. It was in good overall shape. We put our problems in the hands of architect Robert Woods Kennedy.

The kitchen proper was our major concern because, to us, it is the beating heart and social center of the household. Although this was our ninth kitchen, we never before had had the luxury of a large and well-proportioned room. We intended to make it both practical and beautiful, a working laboratory as well as a living and dining room. Fortunately, our structural changes were minor. Mr. Kennedy suggested we move the double sink from its cramped and original positions crowded against a side wall.

Then, since we needed more wall space, he covered up one window with pegboard, where Paul worked out a stunning arrangement of copper saucepans and skillets. The existing cupboard and drawer arrangements suited as well enough (we later put all the drawers on nylon runners), giving room from our large old restaurant-size gas stove shipped up from Washington, our wall ovens, chopping block, dishwasher and refrigerator.

Since we rejoice in the shapes of tools, cooking utensils become decorative objects, all carefully orchestrated by Paul from pots and pot lids to skillets, trivets and flan rings. Even the knives are graduated according to shape and size on vertical magnetic holders. Glass measures and earthenware pitchers are hung just so, while scissors hang in harmony with olive pitters, bottle openers and nut-crackers. We have a bookcase for dictionaries, atlases and bird lore, and paintings by friends. A painted artichoke lives over the wall ovens and a painting of eggs is over the refrigerator. A painted valentine is glued to its door, along with Paul’s colorful photographs of a boeuf daube en gelée, a pâté en croûte and a string of sausages.

Such was the initial design for the kitchen, and so it has remained with minor changes these fifteen years. In it we receive our friends, we cook and dine, we teach and experiment. We have even photographed and filmed in it. It is certainly the most-loved and most-used room in the house.

We would never build a house like this one again. In the first place, who could afford one, let alone two, pantries nowadays? And I would never waste space on a dining room: We use ours frequently as a photographic studio; only occasionally for its original purpose. But after fifteen years of occupancy, it is indeed a supremely comfortable home to cherish. Surrounded by good friends and large shade trees, we couldn’t ask for a happier place to live.